Cannot get Create Address Locator (Gazetteer) to function

[NeoGeo]

I was wondering if anyone had successfully gotten the Create Address Locator (Gazetteer type) tool to run successfully. I have tried it in ArcGIS 10.0 SP5 and 10.1. I have tried with dbf's and tab delimited text files both of which it seemed to read the column names fine but when it ran it would just crash with no error information. I have tried re-saving the data in utf-8 and ANSI encoding. I have tried removing every field except name, latitude, and longitude and cutting the file down to 5 records but it still fails. I have tried having the lat/longs as both strings and numbers in the dbf, but it still did not work.

I have run it about 30 different ways over a two day period and have attached two test files - a tab delimited text file with 10 records and a zipped dbf file with 5 records and all columns stripped out except name, lat, and long as examples of a couple of the different types I tried that failed. The actual file I want to process is millions of records but it fails just the same with these small ones.

I will be appreciative of any additional ideas of things to try
Thanks 🙂

[NeoGeo]

Update:
I decided to try turning the data into an xy event layer and export to shapefile which took another 2 days to process.  It actually was able to build a the locator from the shapefile, BUT when I published it and tried to use it, it just fails with this error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. 

Stack Trace:


[HttpException (0x80004005): No Content]
   ESRI.ArcGIS.WebServices.BaseServiceHandler.ReadStringRequest(HttpRequest request) +105
   ESRI.ArcGIS.WebServices.BaseServiceHandler.QueryStringService(HttpContext ctx) +28
   ESRI.ArcGIS.WebServices.BaseServiceHandler.QueryService(HttpContext ctx) +63
   ESRI.ArcGIS.WebServices.ServiceHandler.QueryService(HttpContext ctx) +239

[Anonymous User]

Original User: NeoGeo

Perhaps this will help someone...
That the Geocoding Gazetteer takes a table as input in the manner something like XY Event Layers do is not really correct.  You can apparently run this thing all day long on tables and get nowhere.  The input apparently has to be the attribute table of a GIS layer.  Also, according to the forums, there are some bugs in 10.0 that ESRI apparently decided not to fix.  Also the error I posted in the second reply was the result of me copying and pasting the service soap url instead of the rest url to the geocoding service once it was published.  That said, I have given up on the public names data as the tool just does not seem to like it, and generated some Gazetteers with non-public data which executed pretty quickly; however, they still are not returning any results even if I type the names exactly the same.  Will post back when I figure out what is wrong.

[Anonymous User]

Original User: rborchert

I just created one a few weeks ago using Tiger files of street centerlines.

Worked perfect.   Does the Gazeteer file have address rancges?

[NeoGeo]

No to the address ranges.  They are just place names.  The other types of geocoding have always worked for me, just not the Gazetteer. 

I tried using a different dataset today which had the placenames broken into separate files based on types (Admin, Historical, etc).  The first file which had almost nothing in it except cities actually succeeded and when I tested it, it was functional, but all the others crashed ArcCatalog completely so I submitted the error reports to ESRI.  I don't really need all the extra fields so I may be able to get by with single field geocoding instead of Gazetteer since that has worked before.